Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Sep 10, 2006

Dec 02/2006 Update: See this article for a ready to go preference file!

I've been using Mac OSX for most of my development these days. A while back I wrote about this nifty little application called Visor. It drops down a terminal from the top of your screen offering you a shell in seconds with any user-defined keystroke. I love this little app, but something strange has been happening. The more I use it the bigger and bigger it gets. Yesterday, the Visor had grown from taking up about 1/3 of my screen to now using the entire thing. Was I going insane? Turns out that it's a known bug in 1.2.1. Great, so what to do?

Turns out that there's a simpler answer than just waiting for a new release. Just go to your Library/Preferences folder and find a file called com.apple.Terminal.plist and delete it. (You should probably quit terminal.app before doing so.) After you restart Terminal.app you'll see your Visor is back to the proper height but also back to the default white screen with black text.

Personally, I use a transparent black terminal with white text and a dark red cursor. There are instructions on the Visor site to reset your window but I'll reproduce (and slightly modify) those here to save you the trip:

  1. Switch to Terminal.app
  2. Bring up Visor's window
  3. Choose "Window Settings" from the Terminal menu
  5. Select "Color" from the Drop Down List
  6. Alter Color settings to whatever you like
  7. Close the Window
  8. Settings are saved when Visor hides
  9. Quit and relaunch terminal and it should be ok

If for some reason when you quit and relaunch terminal you find that the window is really wide (say as wide as the default Visor width) then go ahead and bring up the Terminal.app Window Settings again and change the Window width back to 80 by 25 and set as default. It won't alter Visor's width or height.

I'm going to keep a closer eye on my Visor now. Hopefully a newer version will come out soon that fixes this bug. But if not, at least you have a band-aid that will hold you over for a while.